‘Europeanity’, the ‘other’ and the discourse of fear: the centrality of the forced migrant as 'global alien' to an emerging European national identity

PhD Thesis

Cetti, Fran 2012. ‘Europeanity’, the ‘other’ and the discourse of fear: the centrality of the forced migrant as 'global alien' to an emerging European national identity. PhD Thesis University of East London School of Law and Social Sciences

Authors

Cetti, Fran

Type

PhD Thesis

Abstract

The forced migrant, driven into the global circuits of ‘survival migration’, and subject toan increasingly securitised European asylum and immigration system, is fashioned atthe Europe Union’s distended and de-territorialised external borders as a figure of fear.This thesis seeks to demonstrate how this operation goes far beyond the quotidian socialproduction of marginal and excluded figures: it argues that the forced migrant hasbecome a key ideological resource in the attempt to de-historicise, universalise andnaturalise the neoliberal system of global capitalism. Based on secondary literature, butusing primary sources where necessary to validate its arguments, the thesis investigatesthe way Europe’s core nation-states attempt to displace their contradictions andconflicts – inherent in their nature as centres of and conduits for global capitalism –through the manipulation of deeply embedded nationalist narratives ofinclusion/exclusion. The national border is key to the discursive definition of the forcedmigrant as a threatening ‘global illegal’. The thesis argues, however, that the concept ofthe European border has expanded from its everyday construct into a normative globalinstrument that not only assigns identity, but is summoned into being by the supposedinherent qualities of the individual who attempts to cross it, wherever they may be. Thecreation of racial stereotypes has become one of the foremost tools of this form ofidentity management: the research reveals that the racialisation of the figure of the‘absolute alien’ plays a fundamental role in the construction of an overarching sense of‘European-ness’. The war on terror, by summoning up the racialised figure of the‘global jihadi’, which is discursively linked to the image of the forced migrant as athreatening global ‘illegal alien’, has enabled the creation of a European asylumsecuritynexus. The way the figure of the forced migrant has been fashioned into thenatural subject of a politics of (in)security has become an essential component in theconstruction of a hyper-national ‘European identity’. The thesis concludes that theforced migrant, fashioned out of national materials as the ultimate ‘global alien’, is theideological pivot for the normalisation of a global system of exploitation as manifest inits national form, and gains an even more exaggerated importance when economic andpolitical crisis presents an overwhelming need to promote the idea of ‘European-ness’.